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As everybody knows (or should know) Steamboy is a film by Ootomo Katsuhiro released in 2004 and that took almost 10 years in the making because of the incredible level of quality demanded by the director and also because of financial problems. Finally was released and it was worth the wait: I found it amazing. Actually in 2004 I spent 3 months in Japan travelling north to south and I made my schedule considering 2 things: opening of Steamboy and the opening of Hauru no Ugoku Shiro by Miyazaki. It turned out ok, and as I set my foot in Narita I went straight to Yurakucho where they were showing Steamboy. Great way to start a trip!

So this books is all about the artwork of the film, and what art! The backgrounds, supervised and many created by the amazing Kimura Shinji, are just incredible. The quality and level of detail is just out of this world. Also in the film, the 3D integration is still the best I have seen in any animated movie.

The Art of Steamboy is a pretty thick hardcover coffee table book and it shows, I believe, all the background art, lots of elements and film stills, some examples of composition and much more.

We also get concept art and some line art and layouts. Everything is shown in chronological order, as things happen in the movie.

The book has a lot of text but it is all in japanese. There are interviews and some information section about the artists at the end of this big book (272 pages)

Finally you can see the clean (no text superimposed) backgrounds of the end credits scenes, showing us the further adventures of Steamboy, they are quite amazing, both paintings and situations!

So in the end a really great book, definitely recommended. It is out of print now but it pops up from time to time on eBay or amazon.co.jp.

As a bonus, here I bring you some pics of the Steamboy cinema brochure. Quite nice too!

Hope you enjoyed. Next time let´s go for something more american style!

The exhibition is about the work previous to the final art that we can see in the movie: image boards, storyboards, production design, layout and background art. It is not a huge exhibition but it has quite a lot of stuff, some of it absolutely iconic as is the case of the Ghost In The Shell background art.

So let´s go step by step and see what we can find here.

As you enter the exhibition the first thing you can see is the work of Ogura Hiromasa. He was the background designer for Patlabor, Ghost in The Shell, The Wings Of Honneamise… He works often with Oshii. As they explain in the book, the Patlabor background art was really groundbreaking at the time, where before this movie the background was usually considered a secondary element in anime. This changed with Patlabor and even more with Akira. Since then, background art can be in many cases called exactly that: art.

We can see Patlabor stuff, also backgrounds from Ghost In the Shell, including some of my favorite moments in the movie: the melancholic and beautiful Ghost City sequence under the rain with that amazing Kawai Kenji music and the final shoot-out in the flooded museum. Seeing the real art just right there in front of you is really chilling. Ogura is a master.

Next to Ogura we can see some Oshii Mamoru materials: mostly Tokyo Scanner, a short film about Tokyo as seen from a helicopter and full of the characteristic graphic design of Oshii´s films and also music by Kawai Kenji again. I bought this dvd a few years ago in Roppongi Hills but as it is not an easy item to find is cool you can see it here n better quality than YouTube (20 minutes running time).

We can see here also the work of Higami Haruhiko. His position is something called “concept photographer”. This s a role created by Oshii in Patlabor where Higami went around Tokyo and other locations taking pictures of buildings, streets, canals or other elements that can be used as inspiration for the look of the film. For example, Higami went to Hong Kong to take hundreds of pictures as reference for Ghost In The Shell. Many of his pictures were used in the final art in a different of ways: framing, lighting, etc. But the pics were in BW to not interfere in the color scheme later to be created. Besides film Higami also worked with a fellow named Syd Mead, as he was the photographer in the book Oblagon.

After Higami we can see the work of Watabe Takashi. This man is a master of layout and mechanical design. Everything looks real, working and complex. You can see here his work for Patlabor, Ghost In the Shell, Innocence, Metropolis, Evangelion and what is more interesting: the production design he did for Sarah, this is, the manga “The Legend of Mother Sarah” written by Otomo Katsuhiro and drawn by Nagayasu Takumi. This quite an exceptional thing: the sets and environments and more elements were previously designed by Watabe so when the actual art began, Nagayasu had complete information about where actions took place. The world was created beforehand.

All the Watabe art shown in the exhibition is really of outstanding quality and also you can see some written notes by Oshii about how to design the creation of the gynoid in the main credits scene of Innocence. Good stuff.

Next we find Anno Hideaki. Coincidentally Anno sat just behind me in Tokyo last May in a screening of Battleship in a Shinjuku theatre (bad bad movie, btw). Anno is the creator, of course, of Evangelion. In the exhibition all the material is Evangelion related. We can see some layout art (looser than what you can see usually in this field) and also a selection of the huge photographic archive Anno keeps of all things urban: wires, poles, machines, cables, streets, buildings, unusual architecture… I was happy to find out that Anno has the sames interests in photography as me!

And then finally we have my favorite: Morimoto Koji. Next to Otomo my favorite anime artist. Master of all the steps of the anime creation process, he has an incredible personal style, sometimes bordering surrealism, where figures float, fall or run defying all laws of physics in complex urban environments, maze-like streets or oniric landscapes. He is the bomb, plain and clear. Frequent collaborator or Otomo (he worked in Akira and also in Memories to name two highlights) also he directed music videos, short films like Noiseman and Animatrix Beyond, and lately he did an incredible piece of work called Dimension Bomb for the Genius Party omnibus. This piece is the center of the exhibition and we can see storyboards, layouts, character design, image boards, all by Morimoto himself. Also we can see stuff of the music video “Extra” by Ken Ishii. This was a hugely succesful video clip made in 1996 that won the MTV best dance music video of the year.

So this is a tour of the exhibition. It is really a great chance to see materials that are not supposed to be seen outside the production environment and the selection is really excellent. In the introduction of the book they talk about how they tried to get some Otomo Katsuhiro artwork to show too, but in the end it could not be. Well, fortunately I saw the Gengaten exhibition so I am ok with that, but it would have been just great to see some of his stuff here. Same with Kon Satoshi, also mentioned in the introduction. Thinking about having a bit of all my favorite artists under the same roof so near my place just boggles my mind.

Definitely recommended both exhibition (free entrance) and the book (42 euros)

Thank you so much to all the people who made this exhibition possible. It is really a very special and unique event.